


Stages

by tarragonthedragon



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Interspecies Romance, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-Ring of Solomon, Pre-Canon, Slavery, Tolerating One Another to Enemies, Very Slight Implication of Sexuality, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 18:23:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16455029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarragonthedragon/pseuds/tarragonthedragon
Summary: He looks haggard, on the upper planes, hunched and tired-eyed. His guise is as waifish and bright as ever, bird-clever eyes flicking from point to point about the kitchen as he hovers in the doorway. He is quick. Clever. Enough to have slipped by me more than once, for all his myriad faults.Faquarl's view of Bartimaeus over time changes, and ultimately, stays the same. Their very nature seems to revert them to the  status quo of uneasy disdain.





	Stages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rey_of_sunlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rey_of_sunlight/gifts).



I recognise the name, watching for the first flash of colour, or howling wind, or burst of flame whipping up against the frame of the pentacle.

 

There is silence. A black-and-gold jackal sits, beady-eyed, at the centre.

 

Our new master is talking, but I register little more than the orders behind the words, watching Bartimaeus’ tail twitch limply on the dry stone floor. Steady black eyes that never once bothered to register me.

 

I worry, when fools begin to think. The second we are released of our confines, I step towards him, my form stretching in an eerie loom, inhumanly tall and draped in grey robes.

 

He doesn’t look up, stepping out of the pentacle with catlike daintiness. There is something truly, extremely wrong, but I will not be the one to break this spell. He collapses down into the form of a beetle, zipping up into the air and hovering in place as he awaited me.

 

In silence that grows tired with every beat, we track down the object of our master’s desires. A meaningless trinket.

 

Bartimaeus speaks only as needed to cooperate, follows my plan without objection, single words and phrases jutting out almost like daggers.

 

I turn bird before he can set our tone for the flight away, forcing him to follow my lead. A small plover darts into the shadow of my hawk.

 

“Are you going to tell me?” I ask eventually.

 

“No.”

 

“It’s obvious that _something_ has happened.”

 

“Nothing _happened_ ,” he barks back. Beady black eyes glinting in the sun.

 

The downdraft of my wing is enough to spin him half off-course. He barely reacts. “No half-baked witticism?”

 

He doesn’t respond.

 

Some masters leave a mark. This one, this is some hesitant apprentice, who barely stumbled his way through summoning us both. Once years roll over us both, I come to remember nothing of the fine details—the master, the commands, the journey. It would be just one ineffectual magician amongst dozens if it were not so quantifiably the one where things began to change.

 

***

 

We are on a battlefield, side by side. This is, perhaps, a worse fate than to die in the battle, except that whatever strange mood had possessed him before had blossomed with a vengeance.

 

He fights with tooth, with claw, with knives. Barely a flick of magic except to demolish his surroundings. Spirits fall without time to scream.

 

If he were like this the rest of the time, I might despise him somewhat less.

 

I find myself unusually cautious, just this once. An old enemy as my sole equal amongst our wing of these forces—the distant knowledge of an old friend on the other side of the battlefield. Bartimaeus has never been as strong as I—nor as intelligent, not in the way I regard the skill—but cunning, quick, eager to survive. Traits which have kept him alive through each of our encounters. Traits which seem brutally lacking in him in this shackled collaboration.

 

I allow him to clear a path, dispatching stragglers in his wake. The field lulls, briefly, as the walls before us crumble.

 

“You seem better,” I say dryly.

 

He growls at me, and for a moment I am forcefully reminded of Jabor. The combination is disturbing, more so when Bartimaeus’ bloodstained jaw parts to speak.

 

“Don’t tell me you’re becoming fond of me _here_.”

 

“I’ll make sure to update you as and when I do,” I snap back, already irritated. The next charge is approaching, and we fall quiet as we rise to meet them.

 

I hurl an injured afrit off him with a well-timed detonation, and he leaps over me, mad-eyed lioness-clawed, to snatch a spirit from the air above me.

 

The viciousness does not fade when the battle does. In the last flurry of skirmishes, his gaze latched in on a djinni fully half a mile away from us, and he freezes.

 

Then moves.

 

I find myself hurtling after him, furious at the distraction, and watch him tear open a throat with such force that the spill of blood and essence splatters back onto me.

 

Bartimaeus falls still.

 

“Old friend?” I ask, expecting a sardonic response even now.

 

He turns to me, slipping into the form of a slender Egyptian boy. Examines the grime still clinging to his hands. “Not so old.”

 

It is perhaps, the only time I can enjoy fighting by Bartimaeus’ side. I have always had a fondness for brawlers.

 

It is also the time that stays with me the most, over the years.

 

***

 

This time, I am on guard. I see him approach, and turn to watch him, knife balanced on my fingertip. Irritation unfurls. He’s the Egyptian boy, again.

 

“How is the new master?” I ask, vacuously.

 

He smiles. “Heavy-handed.”

 

I am not surprised. He looks haggard, on the upper planes, hunched and tired-eyed. His guise is as waifish and bright as ever, bird-clever eyes flicking from point to point about the kitchen as he hovers in the doorway. He is quick. Clever. Enough to have slipped by me more than once, for all his myriad faults. “Yours?”

 

“Passable.” He isn’t stupid, however he behaves. I ready myself, clocking each route he might follow, unwilling to be the first to move. “A lot of new punishments, with this one.”

 

He doesn’t, either. “Of all the empires I can’t wait to see fall.”

 

I laugh, leaning back on the tabletop, at a slightly better angle to the knives. “There are others,” I say, exhaustion pushing down on my when I stop to think of it. He seems unbothered.

 

“Would you go back to them?” he asks.

 

I tip back up, thoughtful. Musing has never been Bartimaeus’ style. “No. We move on.”

 

“We have to.” True to form, he’s all words whilst something ticks over beneath the surface, flashy and disorienting, moving in subtle, barely-present little motions that could be positioning him ready for a dozen different attacks. “I would.”

 

Despite fully anticipating it, the attack manages to catch me off guard, listening to him. I’ve sworn not to make the same mistake a thousand times before. Hatred grows incrementally, in jutting stages, not between masters but within their episodes, with shards of disgust and annoyance pushed together into a jagged mess with each new etching of battle lines.

 

***

 

I swoop, owl-silent, through the cracked window, and am struck down immediately. We go from owl and cat to wolf and lioness and gryphon and minotaur before we spring apart, landing on our feet in the forms of the chef and the Egyptian boy.

 

“Bartimaeus,” I greet.

 

He nods. “Faquarl.”

 

“Bodyguard duty?”

 

He shrugs, unusually cold-eyed.

 

“Aren’t you just delightfully—” I break off, barely restraining a yell, as the floor drops out from under me.

 

He leaps down, grim-faced, and we’re moving again. More fight than dance for once, Bartimaeus jerky and emotion-ridden in a way I can’t quite predict.

 

It isn’t enough. I make it past him. Ever infuriating, he survives, lives to be thrown against me some other day.

 

The next time I see him, the oddness settles into a new normal I wish I could deny I understood.

 

***

 

The desert, as it tends to be, is unfathomably hot. The mere thought of water, ice, even breeze, is enough to make my skin crawl with lust.

 

Beside me, Bartimaeus spits insults at magician and commoner alike, unheard from the height of our toil except by me and the horde of imps. The form of the Egyptian boy looks at home here.

 

I ask about him, sick to death of the endless litany of complaints we all share.

 

Bartimaeus shrugs. “Someone I knew.” His gaze catches for a moment on the desert horizon. Egypt is halfway across the world in another direction. “Someone I loved.”

 

Revulsion curls in me, wanting for essence to stir and wrap around a hot core of hatred. The lip of the jovial chef curls in mocking fury. “A _human_.”

 

Bartimaeus—the figure of some human that had touched, and taken, and ruined—met my gaze, chin jutting up. “A magician,” he says.

 

I recoil at the grim honesty to that look. It isn’t that it doesn’t happen—in all ways, it happens, real and unreal, all the forms of love and want that humans have dreamt up and pushed upon us—but the creatures it begets seldom live to walk amongst the rest of us. “A magician,” I repeat, coldly.

 

Bartimaeus isn’t a sycophant, however little I think of him. Crass, perhaps, irritating, even infuriating in the knack for surviving conflicts with spirits above his level. I have never taken him for a traitor, and self-hating—only these last few hundred years.

 

Then the facts line up and I almost laugh. “You thought one was _different_.”

 

“It’s a good form,” he says, the flat tone barely a warning. “And at least I wasn’t stupid enough to grow fond of one that only blends in in a kitchen.”

 

I toss my falcon-head, drawing myself up another level. “I suppose that means _you_ won’t have the spirit to turn on them.”

 

“That isn’t going to happen.” He moved more lightly than I had, slighter and more supple.

 

In future, he makes no attempt to avoid that form in front of me. If anything, it makes me despise him more. Regardless, he continues to survive.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written a character study in a really long time? But I really loved wiritng this, thank you so much for the prompt! It got a little away from me and turned into shipping fic, kinda, but I really hope you enjoyed! Please comment if you liked this, and always feel free to drop requests or feedback here or [on tumblr](http://pennylehane.tumblr.com/ask)!


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